Canisteo-Greenwood Central School District

Good morning, late yesterday the Supreme Court of Nassau County ruled that the mask mandate imposed by the NYS Department of Health is unconstitutional and was reported all over the news. This is the opposite of a recent ruling in the Albany County Supreme Court which upheld the mask mandate. In a message from the State Department of Education (NYSED), it is their understanding that the NYS Department of Health will appeal the decision first thing this morning, which will result in an automatic stay that will restore the mask mandate until such time as an appellate court can issue a further ruling. Therefore, schools must continue to follow the mask rule. NYSED oversees the Canisteo-Greenwood Central School District and we must follow their direction until we are told otherwise. Our attorney has advised us that we follow NYSED's direction to continue to follow the mask rule until it is fought out in court. I understand your frustration and it is heartbreaking to think that our kids and staff are once again caught in the middle of these flip-flop court decisions. Regardless of where you stand on the issue, this is extremely complicated and I ask that you remain patient with us until we hear more from the state today. If you have any concerns or questions, please reach out to me personally at tcrook@cgcsd.org. Yours in service, Tom

A message received from Kelly Houck, GST BOCES District Superintendent: We were just informed that the stay regarding the masking decision was granted temporarily until Friday the 28th where there will be another hearing. This means that the Nassau County order invalidating 10 NYCRR 2.60 is stayed, meaning that the regulation continues to be in effect. Masks are mandatory again until the court can hear more arguments on procedural grounds. Clearly, this is not the end knowing that more hearings will be held. Please be patient for the next few days as we have no idea where this will fall out in the end, but we should have the weekend to understand.

Good evening, after much consideration for blowing and drifting snow overnight and a key highway department being down a few trucks, Canisteo-Greenwood Central School will be closed tomorrow, Tuesday, January 18th.

Due to impending storm, there will be no athletic practices or extracurricular activities tomorrow, Monday, January 17th.

Parents/Guardians Just a reminder all Canisteo-Greenwood schools will be closed Monday, January 17th in observation of MLK Holiday. Classes will resume Tuesday, January 18th.

Good morning, Considering the new covid regulations for schools and the county or state no longer contact tracing for schools, what does that look like for CG students, staff, and families? Contacts: CG administration will continue to contact trace while the cases remain high. You will receive a message from the school that your child may have been in close contact with a covid positive while in school or in an extra-curricular activity. The message that you receive will ask you to please monitor symptoms over the next 5-10 days and we will offer tests for screening if the family chooses. You are not obligated to participate in the screen testing and if you would like, we will send some tests home so you can screen your child yourself. Your child will no longer be quarantined for being a potential contact. The county and state health departments are not issuing quarantine orders for being a close contact. The district will continue to require all unvaccinated students and staff to remain home for 5 days if they have a positive in their household. Cases run rampant through a home (especially with Omicron), and we know that the chances of the student or staff member contracting covid is much higher at home than as a school contact. As we continue down this path, we will assess the need to send notices home. If the cases continue to drop and the cases are minimal, we will stop sending the notices home and ask our families to monitor their child for illness (just like we did before covid). We will let you know when we make that decision. Symptomatic: If your child becomes symptomatic either at home or at school, the following will be asked to return to school: A negative covid test, or If you do not want to test your child for covid, you must seek an alternative diagnosis, or If you do not want to either test for covid or seek an alternative diagnosis, we will ask that you keep your child at home for 5 days These requirements are from the New York State Health Department and still exist. Positive Covid Test: If a student or staff member is diagnosed with covid, he or she is required to isolate for 5 days. If he/she feels well enough to return after the 5 days, please return. If he/she remains ill (especially with a fever), please stay home for the remaining 5 days or until symptoms subside. If you receive a positive test at school, no action will need to be taken because we are required to report our test results to the county health department. The individual will need to go onto the county health department website to print out their own isolation order. Parents may need this order to show their employer to be eligible for covid leave. If a home test, families need to report the positive to the county through their website and provide a picture of the positive test with the positive’s name and the date written directly onto the test. We ask that families please report the positive to the school. Quarantines: To simplify this the best way I can, the only way that a person will be “quarantined” anymore is they are 1. positive for covid or 2. are unvaccinated and have a positive household member. Quarantine orders no longer exist for being a close contact. This is a major change from the past few years! If you have any questions, please email cgcovid@cgcsd.org and we will do our best to answer any questions that you have. Yours in service, Tom

While the district is still digesting the new covid protocols for schools, there is one thing that we want to communicate immediately. Since contact tracing has technically ended for the county, we feel that it is important that the district continues to notify parents of a potential contact at school. Until we know exactly how the NYS Department of Health is going to contact trace schools, CG will continue to do our own contact tracing. If your child has been in contact with a positive covid case at school, you will receive a message (text or email) from us stating that your child has been in close contact, please monitor symptoms over the next 5 days, and screening tests (similar to test-to-stay) will be offered. You will not receive any quarantine orders at this time but rather a courtesy heads-up that your child has been in close contact. Once we get more concrete information as to how this will all work with schools, I will pass that information on to the community. Yours in service, Tom

The National Weather Service is issuing a wind chill advisory for tomorrow morning. Due to the temperatures not reaching the threshold for a delay or closure, our buses will be directed to wait a little bit at stops so that the bus students do not need to wait outside. The drivers will also stop and ask any walker that they see in the village if they would like a ride the rest of the way. Please dress accordingly.

Good afternoon, I know many of you are probably wondering what is going on this week with CG Covid numbers. Here is what we have as of now: - 38 cases have been reported to the county: 9 from the break itself and 29 cases this week. - 19 staff, 11 high school students and 8 elementary students. Going into the break and with the new Omicron variant (highly contagious but milder symptoms) we knew that we would be facing many positive cases. Historically coming off a break, the positives are from contacts outside of the school setting and this break was no different. I know some are probably thinking (as we did coming off the Thanksgiving Break), "what is our breaking point for going remote"? Our conversations continue to be the following: 1. If school transmission remains as it has (extremely low) and it is safe to be here as deemed by the county, we remain open. 2. If staffing becomes an issue and we do not have the number of subs required to fill all the vacancies, we fall back to the original plan of filtering all the substitutes to the elementary building to keep it open and the high school goes remote. High school students would follow their bell schedule. All after school activities would remain active (sports, clubs, etc.) - The logic behind this is that it is more difficult for elementary parents to find childcare for their children and virtual learning is tougher for our younger students. - High school students can handle the bell schedule and the technology required to go remote for any period of time. Also, most HS students do not need childcare. Once we had enough staff for both buildings, the high school would immediately re-open. 3. We do not have enough bus drivers to complete our routes. If provided enough lead time, we may ask that the parents self-transport or work out an alternative plan and keep our buildings open, but this is strictly situational and will be a game-time decision. I wanted you to know our thoughts of what could potentially happen if we were forced to go remote for a period of time. My hope is that as staff members currently in quarantine begin to come back that we have enough staff and substitutes to keep our district operational. Thank you for your continued support during these times. Yours in service, Tom

The Canisteo-Greenwood Central School District will be distributing the state-supplied at home tests to their families Tuesday, January 4th from 4pm-6pm and Wednesday, January 5th from 3:30pm-4:30pm at the Elementary School back parking lot. Upon arrival, families will be directed to enter the Visitor Parking Lot and cones will assist you in making your way through the back parking lot to a designated distribution site. You will be snaking your way through the parking lots to plan for a potential extensive line of cars. Staff will be in the tent asking for the names of the students in your household that you are there to pick up the tests for. Please know that we only received enough tests for each of our students PreK-12. You will receive 1 box of tests/students in the home. For example, if you have 2 school-aged students in your home, you will receive 2 boxes, if you have 5 students in your home you will receive 5 boxes, etc. Each box contains 2 “at-home” tests to use at your discretion. Families are not required to pick up or use these tests. This is strictly voluntary. Once you have received the tests, you can use them to test your student any time that you feel necessary. If your student(s) tests positive, you are directed to report the positive to the Steuben County Health Department at www.steubencony.org or www.steubencony.org/publichealth. The county is asking that you upload a picture of the positive test to them on the website. Please write legibly the name of the positive and the date directly on the card that indicates the result. We also ask that you email the school at cgcovid@cgcsd.org of the positive result. By doing so, we may be able to assist you in your communication with the county if you should have any issues. If your child tests negative, there is no action you need to take. Directions on how to administer the test will be in the box. Please make sure to read the instructions carefully prior to testing. We are hoping that the directions will be clear enough. If you have any questions about the testing procedure, please contact the company directly. Just a reminder that the district still can test symptomatic individuals during the school day.

As we are coming off of our break and continue to see a rise in cases, we ask that if your child has any covid symptoms that you please keep them at home until they can be tested. Our last break (Thanksgiving) yielded some of our highest case numbers and this one is projected to possibly do the same. We will be receiving our shipment of test kits tomorrow which will assist us this week with symptomatic individuals and also allow families to test at home if they choose.

Dear Families: This week, Governor Kathy Hochul identified a statewide goal of having as many students as possible tested for COVID as school resumes January 3. To accomplish this, the state will be providing enough testing kits to test every single student. The testing kits will be shipped to our BOCES to where they will then be distributed to each school district for distribution to all families. The Governor is asking that these tests be supplied as soon as possible to families, our intent is to provide these to you during the week of January 3rd, the exact date will depend ultimately on when our shipment is received from the State. To be clear, there is no requirement that families test their children with these test kits, but the State is encouraging families to do so. To ensure that these test kits are delivered to all student’s families that would like one, we will be developing a plan and will announce it next week when we get our delivery of tests. We anticipate other updates and changes related to the on-going management of school operations due to the pandemic, once these are provided, we will send another update. Thank you for your continued support through these ever-changing regulations and in ensuring that we create the safest school environment for all students to learn. Yours in service, Tom Crook Superintendent

Welcome to the 2021-22 High School Winter Band Concert. We hope you enjoy it! https://youtu.be/giNZsFk7jAA

Good afternoon. I wanted to send out an update on the recent covid cases at CG. Although we have seen a number of cases since our last correspondence, many of our cases are still a result of a positive household member. You may have seen in the county's report of CG having cases but I report all cases to the county whether the individual was in school or in quarantine, hence that is why you are seeing our name in their report. Outside transmission still continues to be prevalent and we are constantly assessing the risk of transmission in school. Here are our numbers to date: Cases: 160 (79 last school year) Quarantines from Close Contacts at School: 314 (606 last school year) Yours in service, Tom

Good afternoon. Over the past 2 days, CG has reported 9 new student cases to the county (4 HS and 5 Elem). 7 of the 9 cases were due to contact with a positive household member. The 19 close contacts for quarantine have been contacted. We did see a decline in cases since Monday's numbers and we will continue to monitor our cases closely. Yours in service, Tom

As home athletic contests begin this week, just a friendly reminder that all spectators are required to properly wear masks while inside the building. Concession stand will be open, but we ask that all food is consumed safely in the hallway. No food will be allowed in the gymnasium at this time. We are excited to have everyone back to support our athletes.

Good afternoon. Today CG reported 5 student cases to the county. All 5 cases were due to exposure to a positive household member. All contact tracing has been completed and the families have been notified.

Good afternoon. As our cases continue to rise coming off of the Thanksgiving break, I feel it is important to report our numbers daily so our community knows what is happening in real time. If our numbers begin to decline, I will go back to my once-a-week reporting. Please remember that you can see our cases as they are reported on the link from our website that goes directly to the state covid report card. Today, we reported 7 new cases (1 elementary teacher, 5 elementary students, and 1 HS student). The contact tracing has been completed and all affected families for quarantine have been notified. Luckily, the test-to-stay option is keeping many of our asymptomatic students in school and not missing important instruction. Just a reminder, the test-to-stay option is for school ONLY. The student is not allowed to participate in any after school activities, including sports. Yours in service, Tom

Good afternoon. Unfortunately, since last Wednesday the district has reported 21 covid cases (4 employees, 10 high school students, and 7 elementary students). Many of the cases were reported over the break, with 10 of them due to a positive household member. Contact tracing is ongoing for many of the cases and once we have identified the close school contacts, we will be reaching out to those families. This is a staggering number and we will be keeping a close eye on our cases coming off a holiday break. Your in service, Tom

Good afternoon. Here is this week's covid update: we have reported 9 cases to the county (4 HS students, 3 elementary students and 2 HS faculty members). Through our contact tracing, we identified 4 individuals for close contact that would be required to quarantine. All eligible student contacts have chosen the "test-to-stay" option. Out of the 9 cases, 6 were in contact with a positive household member. As you can see, our case numbers have started to climb but our quarantine numbers remain low due to our mitigation strategies (masking, distancing, and vaccinations). Yours in service, Tom